


i'm thinking of what sarah said

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Halt and Catch Fire
Genre: Angst, Bisexuality, Death of a Parent, First Kiss, HIV/AIDS, M/M, Season 3 Spoilers, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-08-15 21:42:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8073733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: Who’s going to watch you die, Joe Macmillian?A few glimpses into Joe's head during 3x05 and 3x06.





	1. Chapter 1

**I.**

 

The really, _supremely_ fucked up thing about all this was that he barely even remembered sleeping with Rick.

Some party - God, he had so many _stupid_ parties - a hand on his lower back, a knowing look down his nose at Rick, who liked tall ( _everyone_ liked tall), and a fuck in a quiet corner of the master bath, the music on the other side of the door vibrating against Joe’s back as he hoisted Rick up around his hips. Nothing mindblowing. Not like with Cameron, or Sara, or Simon, or even some of the other tattooed girls and stammering guys he’d slept with since he got to California. He and Rick were _nothing._

Nothing but too drunk to grab a condom and one bland orgasm later, a knock at the door to sniffle that - surprise! - you’re both probably dying.

 _How strange, to sit on the couch with your assassin._ He thought as he poured Rick another glass of wine. He kept his face impassive as tears started to roll down Rick’s. Rick collapsed against his chest and he tensed for a second, wanting to recoil at the touch, before he remembered the poison might already be coursing through his veins.

Joe sucked in a breathe and tucked his arms around Rick, held him as his sobs beat against his chest. He kissed him on the head, on the lips. He picked up one of Rick’s hands - clammy already, or maybe that was just his mind seeing signs that hadn't yet appeared - and kissed that too, right in the center of the palm. 

Cameron used to do that, in the early hours of the morning, when she was still cuddly and half-asleep and her barbed-wire walls were no where to be seen.

Joe never told her how much he liked it.

 

**II.**

 

When Joe first moved to San Francisco, he started thinking about his mom for the first time in a long time.

Every street he walked down reminded him of her, in some strange way. The cobblestones and cracked sidewalks, the steep hills that swooped into valleys and back up again, the smell of low tide in the bay. It was all new, all alien, and yet he imagined Eileen on every bench, spread out on the grass, digging her feet into the cool dirt. As much a part of the city as the Golden Gate bridge.

He thought about how she’d died in this very city, looking at the same twinkling lights he stared down at now. He wondered if it would make her sad, that her son, her _Joey_ , might end up just the same way.

 _She never knew about me and guys._ Ryan sat on the balcony behind him, yammering about something that faded in and out of focus in his ears. Joe almost turned around and told him that. A strange, wet pressure pushed against his throat, urging him to blurt out everything that was inside of him, because soon it might be too late. _She didn’t know about me and girls, either. I was too little when she left. She didn’t know me at all. She probably would've hated me, the things I say and do and the marriage I destroyed and the fires I watched burn._

“My mother lived here.” He settled on, leaning against the metal railing. “She died here.”

Ryan took another bite of the lo mein wrapped around his fork.

 

**III.**

 

Joe barely slept. He twisted himself up in his sheets, thinking about Rick, how much he shook in his arms. When he did drift off, his dreams brought him back to the living room, watching, powerless, as Rick rapidly disintegrated and blew away on the wind.

His shirt was choking him, the cotton was a thousand pounds and hot as molten lead. He tore it off around eight in the morning, when the deceptively blue sky and yellow sun shone merrily down through his windows. He sat up, swung his legs over the mattress, and blinked down at the street below. He wondered if overheating, if fever, was the first sign of the end.

He’d seen people on the streets, pale with dark lesions peppering their waxy skin. Stumbling, being carried or tugged along by friends, lovers. Certain bars with names scratched into the wall.

Who was going to help him up the hills, when his body broke down too much to climb them? Who was going to hold him on his couch or remember his name when he couldn’t run around the country screaming it anymore?

_Who’s going to watch you die, Joe Macmillian?_

The wet pressure in his throat relaxed, and his face felt hotter, hot and wet, and a loud, hoarse sob escaped. He clapped sweaty hand over his mouth, too late. His failure to even stifle that caused more tears, more uneven gasps he couldn’t contain. He dropped his hand, clutched the side of his mattress and let his head drop, let the tears fall on his knees, down to the floor to warp the wood. Let the damage be the sign he was here, he’d existed, he’d almost done something great.

He thought he heard a creak in the floorboard behind him, out in the hall, but he didn’t care. He just let himself cry until his stomach ached, because fuck being a silicon valley enigma, fuck serenity and acceptance, fuck pretending an undignified death at fucking thirty-six didn’t get to you.

 

**IV.**

 

Ryan was still here. Ryan didn’t seem to leave. Joe wondered briefly if perhaps he didn’t have an apartment. Typical Mutiny bullshit, thinking a few lines of code gave you the right to squat in someone else’s life. He didn’t comment on Joe’s sweats, which he’d been wearing for almost three days now. He only smiled tightly and went back to the computer.

Maybe Ryan could just...stay here, if Joe died. He considered this, standing barefoot next to his kitchen table. That could be the good he left in the world, at least for a little while. Ryan seemed like he’d accept that sort of hand-out, not like Cameron. He’d have somewhere to sleep while he tackled ARPANET and anything else that came down the wire.

“Yeah?” Ryan glanced up. Joe blinked. He’d been staring. He hoped it came off wise, appropriately quizzical. Not like he'd been watching Ryan's hands move across the keyboard, imagining Ryan puttering around the kitchen, someone around to watch Joe until he stopped being Joe.

“Nothing. You’re...you’re doing good work.” 

The phone rang.


	2. Chapter 2

**v.**

Joe felt loose, warm, good. The thirty-year-old scotch cupped in his hand, along with the two he’d already downed, probably had something to do with that. He closed his eyes, tipped his head over the back of his chaise, let the cool breeze off the bay brush against his face.

“Since we’re celebrating,” Ryan hiccuped, from his identical lounge chair across the balcony. His dark skin flushed, his eyes a little unfocused. Joe realized, with a mixture of amusement and horror, Ryan was drinking booze older than himself. “Can I just say I’m glad you’re feeling better?”

Joe took another sip without looking at him, without opening his eyes. “What d’you mean?” Shit, he was starting to slur. When he got to slurring levels of drunk, he got chatty and weirdly emotional. He set the glass down on the cushion, letting it press cold against the side of his jeans.

Ryan shrugged, waved a hand vaguely. “Just, y’know, last week, Fourth of July, when you were all mopey and didn’t want to work.” He was sober enough to shut up after that, at least.

Joe did open his eyes then, stared up at the night sky. “You want to know why I was...mopey, did you say?” 

"I just meant-”

“I thought that I was dying.”

Ryan tensed. Joe could _feel_ it. “Shit.” He said, softer. “What-”

“I slept with this man.” It came out loud, louder than Sober Joe would've wanted it to. He straightened up, picked up his glass and swung his legs over the side of the chair, just for something to do. “And a month later he comes around to tell me he’s HIV.”

Ryan didn’t move. Joe lifted his head from the diluting amber liquid in his cup to see him frozen to the eye muscles. “Ryan.” No response. “I’m fine.”

Ryan’s shoulders unhitched. “You sure? You like, went to the-the-” He snapped his fingers, trying in vain to remember the word _doctor_.

Joe stood up, crossed the deck to lean his back against the railing. Ryan didn’t seem to notice. Usually, he moved back whenever Joe stepped forward, like they were diametrically connected, repelling magnets. In sync, but never straying from their respective orbits.

“Yes.”

A pause. Joe stirred his drink with his finger, his mind drifting off to NSFNET, phone calls to make, lawyers to summon and-

“I didn’t know you were…” Ryan blurted out the first half of the sentence, but sputtered out at _you,_ losing both his volume and the confidence to look Joe in the eye.

“Is that a problem?” Joe asked. He kept his voice at the edge of neutral, teetering on threatening but never enough to be accused of such things. A tactic he learned long ago, when he decided it wasn’t his fucking job to make people feel comfortable about who he went to bed with. 

“No!” Ryan tried to lift both hands in front of him, in defense or maybe surrender, but he forgot he was holding a drink and sloshed it down the front of his shirt. “Shit. No, I don’t care. I mean, it’s San Francisco....” He faded off as he dabbed at the wet spot with his hand.

Joe liked that button-up on Ryan, almost more than he liked the whole suit put together. It was fitted, it made Ryan’s shoulders look broader, made him look older, more professional. Even when he had giggled and thrown himself into Joe’s arms.

The last person he hugged was Rick, a condolence hug, a hug because he wasn’t in the business of making out with people in the hallway of his apartment, a hug because death was circling them and there wasn’t anything else he could do.

He couldn’t remember the last time someone hugged him like Ryan did, so full of joy, of happiness. He took his finger out of his drink and sucked the liquid residue off of it.

He wasn’t sure, in the boozy haze, how he ended up crouched at the foot of Ryan’s chair, using his sleeve to soak up the spill. Ryan tensed again. Joe raised an eyebrow and nodded to his hand, his pinky brushing against the narrowest triangle of skin where Ryan’s top buttons were undone.

“I’m not going to kill you, I promise.”

“Do you sleep with a lot of dudes?” Ryan asked, and as he spoke, his face screwed up so tightly it was like he expected a bomb to go off. Joe dropped his hand, a smile tugging at the left side of his face.

“Do you?” He expected another vigorous headshake. Instead Ryan became a statue again. He rested his hand on the top of Ryan’s thigh, feeling the heat of his skin through the fabric. “Do you want to?”  

Ryan flushed even more deeply. Joe expected his lips to scald his own at the temperature they were surely reaching.

They didn’t. They were warm and tasted like scotch and some long ago mouthwash.

Ryan didn’t kiss him back at first, remained frozen and red, but when Joe tried to pull back, he grabbed hold of his shoulder.

“Wow. I, um...wow.”

“We don’t have to.” Joe said. Same neutral voice, blocking the low swoop of humiliation in the pit of his stomach. When it came to situations like this, he rarely misread the signs, but it was always excruciating when he did.

“I’ve had sex before.” Ryan mumbled, addressing Joe’s clavicle rather than his face.

“Congratulations.”

“Just not…” He shook his head and leaned forward again, kissing Joe too hard, nearly knocking him off his haunches. Joe grabbed either side of Ryan’s face and pulled back, thumbing his bottom lip, red from the pressure.

“Ryan.” He said, his smile twitching up again. “ _Breathe._ ”

Ryan exhaled obediently, and melted, melted as Joe pushed him back against the chaise, as flat as he could go, and dug his knees into the cushions on either side of his hips. He ran his hands up Ryan’s chest, enjoying how he shivered underneath him. He kissed his neck, shifted, opened his own mouth a little wider, letting Ryan’s tongue tentatively inside.

“Oh my _God_.” Ryan gasped, nearly whined, into his mouth. He bucked a little underneath Joe, who couldn’t help but smirk as he deepened the kiss, Ryan’s hand clapped around his neck, feeling him already half-hard through his pants.

“I’ll go get a condom.” Joe murmured, leaning over and pressing a kiss to the pulse point in Ryan’s neck.

Ryan pushed himself up on one of his elbows, teetering with a questioning look. “It’s not like you’re going to get me pregnant.” He chuckled, a little breathless.

Joe rolled his eyes and kissed him again, slow and languid. “I’m getting a condom.” He said when they broke apart, more firmly. Ryan’s fingers tightened around his shoulder.

“Wait-wait, can we just...do this, for awhile?”

Joe stared down at him for a minute, but he didn’t really see Ryan. He saw the ghost of a seventeen-year-old, blinking rapidly at the ceiling of the men’s bathroom in a club he was too young for, praying no one would ask him about the scars on his chest and trying to pretend he’d done this before. “God. We’re so drunk.”

Ryan laughed, a strange hissing sound that didn’t require him to open his teeth. His eyes flicked down towards his chest.

“Yeah.” Joe said, settling back against Ryan, tracing his finger across his rich dark skin, down the outline of his jaw. “Of course.”

They could kiss for awhile. He had all the time in the world. He was fucking alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I apologize for the Pushing Daisies reference. In my defense I was making my first apple pie of the fall season this week and it got me re-obsessed with my other fave Lee Pace character.]


End file.
